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SPDIF KeepAlive for Home Theatre PC

I suggest you look at Veg’s SoundKeeper tool first and see if it does what you need. It looks like a much cleaner and more efficient tool than mine (which is now nearly 10 years old! :o). Nice work Veg.

After building a new Home Theatre PC I’ve discovered that the onboard IDT audio has a problem with the SPDIF output, or at least my Sony receiver has a problem with it! Every time a sound is played it causes the SPDIF input on the receiver to initialise which takes about 500 milliseconds, after the sound has finished the SPDIF goes back to sleep. As a result the first 500ms is lost off every sound that is played; not really a problem if you’re watching a movie but for applications that have little blips as you navigate around these sounds tend to get missed altogether; such is the case in MediaPortal the HTPC application I use.

My old motherboard with Nforce sound didn’t have this problem the SPDIF remained “active” all the time.

After much searching I did find a few other people with the same problem but no solution so I’ve written a small .NET application called SPDIFKeepAlive. It does just that. It sits in the system tray and continuously plays a silent wave file to keep SPDIF port active.

52 Responses to SPDIF KeepAlive for Home Theatre PC

Thank you so much, this is just what I needed. Finally I don’t have to start my soundbar every 10min when there is no sound coming from my pc. I have the Philips Sound Speaker HTL2160T connected true SPDIF from my pc. This has been bugging me for the last two years haha

Good stuff VEG! I llike how you even did a little comparison table. That’s so cute. Anyway your code is clearly superior to mine :). Once I’m back on my laptop I’ll update the post to point people to your blog. I love efficiency. Have a great Christmas (if that’s a thing for you). Cheers, Rhys

Hey Rys,
This looks really nice and seems like a turn key solution to keep the sound going.
Even with Dolby Content coming through over say a DvD or a BluRay in Windows Media Center, I’ve still had the occasional drop. This seems to be a good fix and looks like it can be shut off at any time.

Would be cool to create a Linux / NetBSD daemon that works in the same way as this Windows Service!

Thanks for this little program. It has solved a couple of issues I was having. I have a HDMI connected between my Media PC and a Rotel RSP1570 processor. When the HDMI dropped out the sound-card went into error and it would only play stereo in the two front speakers. I normally output a stereo signal and set the Rotel to 7 channel stereo. Also when starting to play I use to miss out on the initial introduction to the track due to the delay in the HDMI handshake.

Thank you so much for making this, you just solved years of being annoyed at this issue with such a simple yet effective application!

For those wanting to run this at startup in Win 10:
Windows Key + R –> Type shell:startup
Make a shortcut to wherever you have stored the application’s exe.
Drag and drop the SHORTCUT of the application to the folder that opened up when you typed “shell:startup”.
The app will now start whenever you boot into Windows. 🙂

Thank you for this application. This helped resolve the 1 second delay i was getting when ever I tried to play any audio file via my AVR from my PC. Also managed to get the application to execute as a Windows Service on my Windows 10 🙂 using NSSM (Non Sucking Service Manager). Now i can enjoy all my audio without the annoying 1 second delay. Thanks once again!!!!!

it was working perfectly on win7, and win10 at the begining when i involuntary upgraded from win7,
but lately it’s not working after some win10 upgrade, i am not sure since when and due to what patch……
each time i pause a video, when resume i get 2 sec of silence……..just like before i found this app years ago
is there any hope of upgrading this app………………..
btw, iam form China, i see you thanking China for parts, i hope………
Sincerely yours

I also want to thank you for this simple but effective app. I’m learning Morse Code using a computer training program, and my SPDIF system was cutting off the beginning of every character, making it impossible to learn the (short) sounds associated with each letter. Your program completely solved the problem. Of course, your app also solved the generally annoying delay with other system sounds, music, and movies, but learning Morse Code was my primary reason for searching for this. Excellent work. Thanks Rhys! I really appreciate it!

Is there a way to select the sound device on which play the sound?
I use an external USB-to-SPDIF card to play on my stereo set, while internal soundcard is used for Skype and system sounds only.
Thank you!
Raf

Cheers, I had a slightly different problem: Windows 10 seems to start and stop the S/PDIF stream every time it plays a sound. My external DAC has some type of mechanical switch that fires when this occurs, so I got an annoying mechanical click from my DAC at every start and stop of an audio indication. Your program has stopped this – thanks a lot!

I have been looking for exactly this for 2 days! . I havent tried it on yet but I am sure it will work in Win7. Thanks again.!! This will save me a lot of troubles about my HTPC optical connection sleep problem!

Thank you, this saved me much frustration. However I found my receiver would still go to sleep at even the tiniest interval of silence with all of the settings except for “Test Tone”. The solution for me was to create a 20KHz wav file and use it as a custom file. Apparently my receiver has a lower end limit but not a higher end one. Thought this might help someone.

In Vista and above, you can have the audible tone running but set the mixer to reduce the volume output specifically by this program to zero. You won’t hear anything but the connection is still kept alive, and you can check on it anytime but raising the program’s volume output.

New version tested and it’s perfect now (for my ears at least ;D). I couldn’t hear the inaudible tone and any sound I play on my computer now is heard on the HT’s speakers without any delay. Thank you.

That’s the same version I was trying. I’ve noticed the 3 options: test, inaudible and silence. Obviosly, only the first 2 keep the output busy. But I can listen to both tones, even the high frequency of the inaudible one. I know it’s not common for humans to listen to frequencies above 16 KHz, but unfortunately that’s my case. I remember once when I made a step motor drive to use in a device and followed the component’s datasheet recommendation to use a frequency of 20 KHz, which would be inaudible for humans. The funny thing is that I was the only one who could listen to the high pitch buzz the machine emitted.

That’s exactly what I was looking for. However, I think I might have a canine ancestor, as I’m able to hear the inaudible tone. That happened to me before with other high frequency sounds people usually couldn’t hear. What frequency did you use? 20 KHz? Is it possible to use a higher one (and maybe also a lower volume)? Thanks in advance.